Swedes and Yankees in Worcester Politics: A Protestant Partnership

SWEDES AND YANKEES IN WORCESTER
POLITICS: A PROTESTANT PARTNERSHIP
KENNETH J. MOYNIHAN
In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, American
society bristled with hostility to immigrants. However, one immi­grant
group was largely exempted from the nativist challenge. As
Frederick Hale demonstrated over a decade ago, Scandinavians
were "cordially received in the United States," mostly because
their religion "helped spare them the malevolent treatment given
many other new Americans."1
Hale examined Protestant religious periodicals, mostly from
Minnesota and other Midwestern states, to show that "many
Protestant clergymen greeted Nordic newcomers and proclaimed
their religious and cultural oneness with them."2 The pattern he
reported can also be shown from an examination of different types
of evidence in a different region of the country.
The Swedes who immigrated to the diversified industrial city of
Worcester, Massachusetts, in the last third of the nineteenth
century soon began to occupy a unique position in the political,
social, and economic structures of the community. A sympathetic
relationship quickly developed between them and the Yankee
(British-stock) inhabitants of the city. As an examination of the
city's politics demonstrates, the relationship was based primarily
on the shared Protestantism of the two groups. In the late
nineteenth century, it manifested itself most clearly in the contests
over the liquor question. As Irish Catholics gained firm control of
the Democratic Party early in the twentieth century, the Protestant
partnership of the Swedes and the Yankees became even more
firmly established.
The political partnership was only one manifestation of the warm
welcome extended by members of the Worcester elite to an
immigrant group, that was, in their eyes, very special.
Like voters across the United States, those of Worcester went to the
polls in November 1888. A predominantly Republican city, Worces­ter
joined in the national decision to replace Democratic President
Grover Cleveland with the Republican Benjamin Harrison.
23
On the Worcester ballot that day there was another choice, the
Prohibitionist Party, which managed to attract only two percent of
the city's vote. The Prohibitionists could not get more than three
percent in any Worcester precinct, with one exception. In the
precinct that included Quinsigamond Village, home to a growing
number of Swedish immigrants, the Prohibition vote rose to 13
percent.
The explanation is not far to seek. Also on the ballot was a
Prohibitionist candidate for state representative, Francis O. Dahl¬
quist, a founding member of the Village's Swedish Methodist
Church and a pillar of the early Swedish community in Quinsiga­mond
Village. Dahlquist polled 48 votes in his home precinct,
which is exactly what the Prohibitionist candidate for president
received.3
In those years, the Prohibitionist ticket was available for the
opponents of the liquor traffic who did not choose to cast their lot
with the Republican Party. More commonly, anti-liquor voters in
Worcester also voted Republican. An examination of the vote in the
December 1888 municipal election makes this dramatically evident.
WORCESTER VOTE BY PRECINCT, DECEMBER, 1988
Ward Precinct Republican for Mayor No on License
1 1 71% 64%
2 46 46
2 1 49 37
2 72 67
3 55 52
3 1 33 12
2 33 26
4 1 19 16
2 40 29
5 1 53 38
2 17 10
3 46 30
6 1 78 65
2 36 45
7 1 65 52
2 77 71
3 81 72
8 1 78 65
2 83 74
3 76 68
Total: 55% 46%
24
Annually, the voters in each Massachusetts city and town
decided whether to allow the retail sale of liquor in their
communities during the following year. The accompanying graph
shows the high correlation between the vote for the Republican
candidate for mayor and the vote against granting liquor licenses in
the city. Numerically expressed, the correlation was .95, where a
perfect correlation between Republican and anti-license voting
would have been 1.0."
Worcester was divided into eight wards shaped roughly like slices
of a pie, with the central business district at the center. The wards
were numbered clockwise, beginning in the northern part of the
West Side, where Yankee Republicans predominated, as they did in
Ward Two, just to the east. Wards Three, Four, and Five on the East
Side were generally conceded to the Democrats, and Irish Catholics
represented them on the Worcester Common Council and in the
state House of Representatives. The Swedes of Quinsigamond
Village in Ward Five were a minor fly in the East Side Democratic
ointment.
Ward Six included the Irish workers of South Worcester, but since
it extended back onto the Yankee West Side, its politics were
controlled by a heavy dose of Yankee Republicanism. As the table
demonstrates, Wards Seven and Eight joined in the overwhelm­ingly
Republican voting behavior of the Yankee West Side.
Such was, very generally, the ethnic, religious, and political
landscape of Worcester when James Forsstedt in 1888 became a
Republican candidate for the School Committee from Ward Two.
Though no Swede had yet been elected to any office in the city,
Ward Two provided Forsstedt with a plausible base. It included
another sizable Swedish community. This one was assembled
around the North Works of the Washburn and Moen Manufactur­ing
Company, a world leader in wire production, as the Quinsiga­mond
Village community was centered on the South Works.
Born in Sweden, Forsstedt was 37 years old in 1888. He had
received an advanced technical education in Stockholm, had
studied briefly in divinity school at Uppsala, then had entered the
world of manufacturing. He had come to the United States in 1880,
immediately entering the employ of Washburn and Moen. In 1888
Forsstedt became chief engineer and in 1893 would be appointed
assistant superintendent.5 His employer, Philip L. Moen—despite
his French name a leading figure in the Yankee business world-was
on the Republican Committee of Ward Two.
25
During the presidential campaign, Forsstedt had done his bit for
the Republican cause. Addressing the Swedish-American Club, he
had appealed for Republican votes on the ground that the
Democrats "did not help the poor people." At its next meeting, the
club had voted to support Harrison for President.6
Once the national campaign had been settled, however, local
Republicans made few references to which party might do more for
the poor. Much more common in the local campaign was the kind
of appeal heard at a meeting of Swedish voters organizing to
oppose liquor licensing in the annual referendum. One speaker
"advised all Swedes to identify themselves with the Republican
party." Poverty having apparently been dealt a solid blow by the
Harrison victory, the speaker pointed to the "rum shops in this
city" as "the only remaining relics of Democratic misrule in view."
He expressed the "earnest wish that they will be swept from the
city limits at the coming municipal election."7
This meeting, held in a Swedish Baptist church to bolster the fight
against liquor, had turned easily into a Republican campaign rally
as well. Before adjourning, the group voted to gather on the
following Sunday afternoon at the Swedish Methodist Church on
Thomas Street in downtown Worcester. From Thomas Street they
would march a few blocks to an anti-license meeting in Mechanics
Hall, to which they had been invited by a Yankee minister.8
While Swedish anti-license forces were preparing for that mass
meeting, Yankee Republicans were carrying the dual message of
Republicanism and no-license to their own people. Congressman-elect
Joseph H. Walker, for example, reminded a Republican dinner
of "the moral distinctions" between the parties.
"The Democratic leaders," he said, "have a vast pecuniary
interest in controlling the government. It is that party which
cultivates, sustains and defends the liquor traffic, the most subtle,
all-pervading and powerful single money interest that now exists in
this country. Clustering about it and sustained by it is every
degrading vice known to civilized man."9
It snowed on the day of the great Mechanics Hall rally, but the
newspapers were nevertheless able to report that "a pronounced
feature of the meeting was the presence, in a body, of some 600 of
Worcester's Scandinavian citizens, who marched to the hall from
the Thomas Street Methodist Church."1 0
The Republican United States Senator from Worcester, George
Frisbee Hoar, presided over the meeting. He remarked upon "the
26
great addiction to drink" imputed to "our Irish brethren," but
praised the Catholic clergy—none of whom seems to have been
present—for their efforts to combat the problem.
Following a series of addresses by Protestant ministers, Hoar
"remarked that one of the best omens in the city is the coming to us
in such large numbers of brethren of Scandinavian birth. It is
pleasing," he added, "to see them taking such an interest in this
question."
When a Swedish spokesman was finally introduced to explain
"how the Swedish people stood on the license question," he began
with a telling point, the force of which could not have been lost on
that audience. "The Swedish people," he declared "are all
Protestants."
The spokesman then showed how the Swedish record in
Worcester set them apart from other immigrants. "In this city you
will not find a saloon that is run by a Scandinavian, nor one who
acts as the tail for one kept by a Frenchman, Irishman, or German."
At that, the audience burst into applause.
The Swedish spokesman concluded with two final remarks sure
to link his delegation to the Yankee sponsors of the meeting. He
endorsed the reelection of the Republican mayor, and he pro­claimed
that "the principle of the American people is in opposition
to the liquor traffic and they will find that we will not antagonize
those principles."11
Thus could the strands of Protestantism, Republicanism, and
opposition to liquor—all characteristics of Yankee Worcester—be
picked up by a Swedish spokesman, be described as equally
characteristic of the Swedish immigrants, and finally be designated
as "the principle of the American people."
A few days later a group of Swedes met in the Thomas Street
Methodist Church to endorse Forsstedt for the School Committee;
when the Republican ward caucus was held shortly thereafter,
James Forsstedt the Swedish candidate because James Forsstedt the
Republican candidate.12
As the campaign unfolded, the no-license forces held a series of
rallies, invariably in Protestant churches and addressed by Protest­ant
ministers.13 The Swedes held one in their own Salem Street
Congregational Church, and the problems that meeting created for
James Forsstedt are instructive.
Despite the strong prohibitionist tendencies of the Swedes and
the high correlation between Republican and anti-liquor voting, not
27
all Republicans were reliably anti-liquor. Indeed, as the election of
1888 was about to demonstrate again, the Republicans could win
the mayoral race while the no-license campaign was losing. Mayor
Winslow would receive 55 percent of the vote, but the anti-liquor
vote would only reach 46 percent.
Under those conditions, Republican candidates often waffled on
the liquor question, and James Forsstedt was no exception. The day
before the election a Worcester newspaper reported:
Mr. James Forsstedt says this morning that his position as a
temperate man has been misstated. He spoke last evening at
the Salem Street Church meeting, and what he said about his
own habits was in substance as follows: He had taken no
temperance pledge and had been sometimes compelled to take
liquor as medicine, but he was not in the habit of taking
intoxicating drinks, although he did not profess to be abso­lutely
a total abstainer. Mr. Forsstedt is a candidate for the
School Committee on the republican ticket of Ward II, and
does not care to be represented as a habitual drinker.14
On election day, Forsstedt ran very strongly indeed, defeating his
Democratic opponent 74 percent to 26. An examination of the vote
on liquor licenses in his three precincts reveals the political wisdom
of his caution. In the first precinct, almost two-thirds of the voters
were in favor of licenses; in the second, where his Swedish
constituency was concentrated, two-thirds voted against; in the
third, the vote was almost evenly divided, no-license winning 52
percent to 48.15
Two incidents during the 1889 election campaign help to
corroborate this analysis of the dynamics of Worcester politics as
Swedes began to get elected to office.
Worcester was in the early stages of what would become a heated
controversy over accommodating the Irish Catholics in the public
schools.16 Simultaneously, the whole state was about to use the
Australian ballot for the first time. And, of course, the campaign
over the annual referendum on liquor licenses was under way. The
tutelary role of the Yankees, and the message they conveyed,
emerged with special clarity when the Worcester Swedes invited
Mrs. Mary E. Trask Hill of Boston to address what was billed as a
temperance rally.
Following a "devotional exercise," Mrs. Hill "spoke of the great
importance of the preservation of our public school system from the
threatened attacks made upon it in certain quarters, and urged
28
Scandinavians to become naturalized as fast as they can, to make
themselves acquainted with our laws and institutions, and assume
that position in our politics which their growing numbers and
intelligence entitle them to."
Following addresses in Swedish by several clergymen, Mrs. Hill
explained the new voting system and called on volunteers to play
various roles. The "temperance" meeting had become an opportu­nity
for a Yankee defender of the public schools to tutor Swedes in
the most effective use of their voting power.17
The anti-liquor bond between the Swedes and the Yankees was
also illustrated in 1889 when a Worcester newspaper editorial
entitled "Snakes in the Grass" charged that dissident Republicans
were "manipulating" the Swedes by urging them to vote for the
Prohibition candidate for mayor.18 A Swedish clergyman replied in
a letter that the Swedes would indeed bolt to the Prohibitionists,
but not because they were easily manipulated. The Swedes were
angry, wrote the Reverend Henry W. Eklund, because "the present
city government voted . . . to grant a liquor license to a Swede, in
face of the earnest protest of a great majority of the Swedish
people."1 9
The rebel saloonkeeper was Martin Trulson, who had not only
obtained a liquor license, but had opened a saloon directly across
Thomas Street from the Reverend Mr. Eklund's Swedish Methodist
Church.2 0
As things turned out, the Swedes did not bolt to the Prohibition­ists
in 1889, but the scandal of Martin Trulson's saloon was at least
temporarily put down. The anti-liquor forces achieved one of their
rare victories; no licenses would be issued in Worcester in 1890.21
James Forsstedt remained the only Swedish elected official in
Worcester until 1893, when John F. Lundberg took a seat on the
Common Council. In 1897 a Swedish State representative was
elected, and in 1904 an alderman. By 1916 there were two Swedes
on the School Committee, three on the Common Council, three on
the Board of Aldermen, and one in the state House of Representa­tives,
all Republicans. In 1916 Pehr G. Holmes was elected mayor of
Worcester.
The state of the art in Worcester politics had evolved considerably
since the late 1880s. The Democrats had taken to nominating Irish
candidates for mayor. In 1901 the Democrats had even elected the
30-year-old Philip J. O'Connell to the city's highest office. From
1901 through 1915 a Yankee Republican had run against an Irish
Democrat every year, and the Democrats had won five times.
29
It was clear that the Democrats would nominate labor leader
James H. Reardon again in 1916. The composition of the Republi­can
ticket, nominated by acclamation at a city convention, reveals
how thoroughly the new Republican strategy was aimed at
undermining the Catholic and working-class votes.
For mayor, the Republicans nominated Pehr G. Holmes, born in
Sweden, an immigrant to Worcester in 1885 at the age of four, and
in 1916 president of his own electroplating firm.2 2 For alderman-at-large
the choice was Narcisse J. Lavigne, son of French-Canadian
Catholic immigrants, owner of a printing firm, and member of
the Chamber of Commerce and the Rotary Club.2 3 For school
committeeman-at-large the candidate was Albert Inman, a Yankee,
a partner in the steel business established by his father and
grandfather, an active Mason, and a member of the anti-liquor
Independent Order of Good Templars.24
The Republicans offered the voters two self-made men—one a
Swedish Congregationalist, the other a French Catholic—and a
Yankee born to industrial wealth.
The Swedish working-class vote had grown enormously in the
years since 1898, but it was not yet as reliably Republican as the
party would have liked. Holmes was expected to pull virtually the
entire Swedish vote into the Republican column.25
Lavigne's candidacy recognized the increasing tendency of
French-Canadian voters to abandon the Irish-dominated Demo­cratic
Party. Since the French vote was also traditionally pro-liquor,
Lavigne's presence on the ticket would help it transcend differ­ences
on the license question, which was still appearing on the
ballot every year. Inman gave the ticket its Yankee industrialist, and
a teetotaler to boot.
As the December voting drew near, the no-license forces
mounted a more vigorous campaign than they had in years. A
determined effort was undertaken to bring the popular evangelist
Billy Sunday to town to administer the coup de grâce to the saloon.
The effort failed, despite the appeal of two thousand Worcesterites
who went to Sunday's Boston tabernacle to chant in unison, "We
want Billy Sunday in Worcester."26
Holmes, Lavigne, and Inman won " in a walk," as the headline
put it.2 7 Holmes repeated his triumph in 1917 and 1918.
Still later, Holmes rendered the Republican party considerable
additional service by winning and holding the Worcester seat in the
United States House of Representatives from 1931 to 1947. The
30
votes of the Swedish and Yankee Republicans in Worcester,
combined with the largely Yankee vote of the Worcester County
towns, were enough to hold back the Democratic tide rising in the
city.
Pehr Holmes brought the Swedish-Yankee political partnership to
two of its pinnacles, first by winning the mayoralty as Irish
Democrats threatened, and then by holding the congressional seat
in the face of the same mounting force. Throughout the Roosevelt
years, Worcester, a largely working-class and Catholic city, was
represented in Washington by a Protestant Republican business­man.
When the tide could be resisted no longer, Holmes was
defeated by an Irish-Catholic lawyer, Harold Donohue, in 1946; the
seat has been in Irish Democratic hands ever since.28
The partnership of Yankees and Swedes revealed in the Worcester
political record extended into other relationships in the community.
Although those relationships have not been studied in detail, a
suggestive sampling is available from Charles Nutt's four-volume
history of Worcester published in 1919. Two of the volumes contain
only biographical sketches, which can be used as a rough index to
community relationships as well as to community prestige as seen
through Yankee eyes in the era of Pehr Holmes' mayoralty.
The overwhelming majority of the biographical entries concern
Yankees, but over 50 are about men of Swedish stock and 29 about
men of French-Canadian background. Although these two groups
could be found in Republican alliance with the Yankees during
those years, for the French the association seems to have been
largely limited to politics; for the Swedes, it went well beyond.
The French and the Swedes were of approximately equal
numbers in the city, so there is an initial disparity in the fact that
Nutt included 50 Swedes and 29 Franco-Americans. This is
especially unbalanced since fully one-fourth of the French listed
were members of the Belisle family, one of whose members was
Nutt's consultant on that ethnic group.
The fields in which the men had achieved their success are
significant. Thirteen of the Swedes, or 26 percent, owned sizable
manufacturing establishments, most of them in the booming metal
industries. Only two of the French, or seven percent, could be
described as manufacturers. In this regard, the French looked less
like the Yankees and Swedes and more like their Irish co­religionists.
Of the 104 Irish citizens of Worcester included in the
Nutt biographies, only eight individuals, or seven percent, owned
31
their own manufacturing companies, all of them small concerns.29
Six of the Swedes were in high supervisory positions in major
Worcester industries, but none of the French. Thirty-eight percent
of the Swedes and 36 percent of the French were involved in such
diverse commercial activities as auto repairs, building contracting,
and undertaking. In this area of business life, the Swedish and
French entries appear in virtually equal proportions.
Very significantly, the sharp divergence between the Swedes and
the French found among manufacturers reappears among profes­sionals,
including journalists as well as lawyers, physicians,
dentists, and teachers. Twelve of the French, or 43 percent, were
listed by Nutt based on their accomplishments in these fields, as
compared with six, or 12 percent, of the Swedes.
The economic importance, to the individual and to the ethnic
group, of membership in the industrial ownership class is too
obvious to require comment here. The Swedes were, from this data
at least, gaining membership in that class much more readily than
were men of French-Canadian background, though the French had
arrived in Worcester in significant numbers a generation earlier
than the Swedes.
From this it can be suggested that the pronounced preference for
Swedish workers shown very early by Yankee manufacturers may
have extended to a marked preference for Swedes when it came to
providing the capital necessary for launching manufacturing
enterprises. Timothy J. Meagher has cited Irish complaints about
their exclusion in Worcester from "networks of connections which
might have aided their climb up to higher positions of finance or
corporate management" as well as from the networks of credit
needed to start their own enterprises.30 If Yankee discrimination
toward the Irish was based on religious differences, the Catholic
French-Canadians presumably suffered from the same discrimina­tion,
despite their political cooperation with Yankee Republicans.
The Yankee historian Charles Nutt summed up with the Yankee
attitude toward the Swedish-American population in 1919. "No
race," Nutt wrote of the Swedes, "has been more welcome and
none has more readily adjusted itself to American standards. . . .
While some idea of the activities of the Swedish people can be
gained from their social and religious organizations, it is impossible
to give a separate history of the Swedish people. They form a
constituent part of the people of the city, in church and society as
well as business and politics."
32
Nutt marshalled evidence to support the claim that the Swedes
were virtually indistinguishable from the "American" population
that had welcomed them. The sequence of his points is worth
noting:
Swedish families attend the various Protestant churches in
large numbers. As a rule, the Scandinavian citizen supports
the Republican party, but with no little degree of independ­ence.
And they have always shown a true loyalty to their
adopted country in times of peace and war.31
The Swedes were welcome, they were Protestant, they were
Republicans, and they were loyal Americans. It is doubtful that
Charles Nutt, a son of Harvard and member of the Sons of the
American Revolution, could have paid them any higher tribute.32
NOTES
'Frederick Hale, "Nordic Immigration: The New Puritans?", T h e Swedish Pioneer
Historical Historical Q u a r t e r l y , 28 (1977), 42-43.
2 I b i d . , 28.
W o r c e s t e r E v e n i n g Gazette, Nov. 7, 1888, p. 4.
"Source: Worcester E v e n i n g Gazette, Dec. 12, 1888, p. 4.
5Charles Nutt, H i s t o r y of Worcester and Its People, 4 vols. (New York, 1919), III, 106.
'Worcester Evening Gazette, Oct. 8, 1888, p. 4; Oct. 17, 1888, p. 4.
7 I b i d . , Nov. 19, 1888, p. 4.
"Ibid.
' I b i d . , Nov. 19, 1888, p.4.
' " I b i d . , Nov. 26, 1888.
" I b i d .
" I b i d . , Nov. 30, 1888, p. 4; Dec. 1, 1888, p. 4.
" I b i d . , Dec. 3, 1888, p. 6; Dec. 4, 1888, pp. 5, 10.
" I b i d . , Dec. 10, 1888, p. 4.
" I b i d . , Dec. 12, 1888, p. 4.
16Robert J. Kolesar, "Politics and Policy in a Developing Industrial City: Worcester,
Massachusetts in the Late Nineteenth Century," (unpublished Ph.D dissertation,
Clark University, 1987) Chapt. 4.
" W o r c e s t e r E v e n i n g Gazette, Oct. 15, 1889, p. 4
" I b i d . , Nov. 4, 1889, p. 4.
" I b i d . , Nov. 7, 1889, p. 4.
2 0 I b i d . , p. 5.
" I b i d . , Dec. 11, 1889, p. 4. Before he went out of business, Martin Trulson went on
trial, charged with selling liquor to an intoxicated man. He was acquitted, largely
due to the talents of his young attorney, Webster Thayer. Thayer would reappear in
the history of immigrant America as the trial judge in the Sacco and Vanzetti case.
2 2Nutt, H i s t o r y of Worcester, IV, 889.
" I b i d . , IV, 670.
" I b i d . , Ill, 426.
^Worcester Telegram, Dec. 4, 1916, p. 1.
2 H b i d . , Dec. 9, 1916, p. 2.
2 7 I b i d . , Dec. 13, 1916, p. 1.
33
2 aThe current incumbent, Joseph D. Early, succeeded Donohue upon his retirement
in 1975.
"Timothy J. Meagher, '"The Lord Is Not Dead:' Cultural and Social Change Among
the Irish in Worcester, Massachusetts," (unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, Brown
University 1982), 158.
m I b i d . , 176-77.
3 1 Nutt, H i s t o r y of Worcester, I, 351.
3 W i d . , IV, 568.
34

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SWEDES AND YANKEES IN WORCESTER
POLITICS: A PROTESTANT PARTNERSHIP
KENNETH J. MOYNIHAN
In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, American
society bristled with hostility to immigrants. However, one immi­grant
group was largely exempted from the nativist challenge. As
Frederick Hale demonstrated over a decade ago, Scandinavians
were "cordially received in the United States," mostly because
their religion "helped spare them the malevolent treatment given
many other new Americans."1
Hale examined Protestant religious periodicals, mostly from
Minnesota and other Midwestern states, to show that "many
Protestant clergymen greeted Nordic newcomers and proclaimed
their religious and cultural oneness with them."2 The pattern he
reported can also be shown from an examination of different types
of evidence in a different region of the country.
The Swedes who immigrated to the diversified industrial city of
Worcester, Massachusetts, in the last third of the nineteenth
century soon began to occupy a unique position in the political,
social, and economic structures of the community. A sympathetic
relationship quickly developed between them and the Yankee
(British-stock) inhabitants of the city. As an examination of the
city's politics demonstrates, the relationship was based primarily
on the shared Protestantism of the two groups. In the late
nineteenth century, it manifested itself most clearly in the contests
over the liquor question. As Irish Catholics gained firm control of
the Democratic Party early in the twentieth century, the Protestant
partnership of the Swedes and the Yankees became even more
firmly established.
The political partnership was only one manifestation of the warm
welcome extended by members of the Worcester elite to an
immigrant group, that was, in their eyes, very special.
Like voters across the United States, those of Worcester went to the
polls in November 1888. A predominantly Republican city, Worces­ter
joined in the national decision to replace Democratic President
Grover Cleveland with the Republican Benjamin Harrison.
23
On the Worcester ballot that day there was another choice, the
Prohibitionist Party, which managed to attract only two percent of
the city's vote. The Prohibitionists could not get more than three
percent in any Worcester precinct, with one exception. In the
precinct that included Quinsigamond Village, home to a growing
number of Swedish immigrants, the Prohibition vote rose to 13
percent.
The explanation is not far to seek. Also on the ballot was a
Prohibitionist candidate for state representative, Francis O. Dahl¬
quist, a founding member of the Village's Swedish Methodist
Church and a pillar of the early Swedish community in Quinsiga­mond
Village. Dahlquist polled 48 votes in his home precinct,
which is exactly what the Prohibitionist candidate for president
received.3
In those years, the Prohibitionist ticket was available for the
opponents of the liquor traffic who did not choose to cast their lot
with the Republican Party. More commonly, anti-liquor voters in
Worcester also voted Republican. An examination of the vote in the
December 1888 municipal election makes this dramatically evident.
WORCESTER VOTE BY PRECINCT, DECEMBER, 1988
Ward Precinct Republican for Mayor No on License
1 1 71% 64%
2 46 46
2 1 49 37
2 72 67
3 55 52
3 1 33 12
2 33 26
4 1 19 16
2 40 29
5 1 53 38
2 17 10
3 46 30
6 1 78 65
2 36 45
7 1 65 52
2 77 71
3 81 72
8 1 78 65
2 83 74
3 76 68
Total: 55% 46%
24
Annually, the voters in each Massachusetts city and town
decided whether to allow the retail sale of liquor in their
communities during the following year. The accompanying graph
shows the high correlation between the vote for the Republican
candidate for mayor and the vote against granting liquor licenses in
the city. Numerically expressed, the correlation was .95, where a
perfect correlation between Republican and anti-license voting
would have been 1.0."
Worcester was divided into eight wards shaped roughly like slices
of a pie, with the central business district at the center. The wards
were numbered clockwise, beginning in the northern part of the
West Side, where Yankee Republicans predominated, as they did in
Ward Two, just to the east. Wards Three, Four, and Five on the East
Side were generally conceded to the Democrats, and Irish Catholics
represented them on the Worcester Common Council and in the
state House of Representatives. The Swedes of Quinsigamond
Village in Ward Five were a minor fly in the East Side Democratic
ointment.
Ward Six included the Irish workers of South Worcester, but since
it extended back onto the Yankee West Side, its politics were
controlled by a heavy dose of Yankee Republicanism. As the table
demonstrates, Wards Seven and Eight joined in the overwhelm­ingly
Republican voting behavior of the Yankee West Side.
Such was, very generally, the ethnic, religious, and political
landscape of Worcester when James Forsstedt in 1888 became a
Republican candidate for the School Committee from Ward Two.
Though no Swede had yet been elected to any office in the city,
Ward Two provided Forsstedt with a plausible base. It included
another sizable Swedish community. This one was assembled
around the North Works of the Washburn and Moen Manufactur­ing
Company, a world leader in wire production, as the Quinsiga­mond
Village community was centered on the South Works.
Born in Sweden, Forsstedt was 37 years old in 1888. He had
received an advanced technical education in Stockholm, had
studied briefly in divinity school at Uppsala, then had entered the
world of manufacturing. He had come to the United States in 1880,
immediately entering the employ of Washburn and Moen. In 1888
Forsstedt became chief engineer and in 1893 would be appointed
assistant superintendent.5 His employer, Philip L. Moen—despite
his French name a leading figure in the Yankee business world-was
on the Republican Committee of Ward Two.
25
During the presidential campaign, Forsstedt had done his bit for
the Republican cause. Addressing the Swedish-American Club, he
had appealed for Republican votes on the ground that the
Democrats "did not help the poor people." At its next meeting, the
club had voted to support Harrison for President.6
Once the national campaign had been settled, however, local
Republicans made few references to which party might do more for
the poor. Much more common in the local campaign was the kind
of appeal heard at a meeting of Swedish voters organizing to
oppose liquor licensing in the annual referendum. One speaker
"advised all Swedes to identify themselves with the Republican
party." Poverty having apparently been dealt a solid blow by the
Harrison victory, the speaker pointed to the "rum shops in this
city" as "the only remaining relics of Democratic misrule in view."
He expressed the "earnest wish that they will be swept from the
city limits at the coming municipal election."7
This meeting, held in a Swedish Baptist church to bolster the fight
against liquor, had turned easily into a Republican campaign rally
as well. Before adjourning, the group voted to gather on the
following Sunday afternoon at the Swedish Methodist Church on
Thomas Street in downtown Worcester. From Thomas Street they
would march a few blocks to an anti-license meeting in Mechanics
Hall, to which they had been invited by a Yankee minister.8
While Swedish anti-license forces were preparing for that mass
meeting, Yankee Republicans were carrying the dual message of
Republicanism and no-license to their own people. Congressman-elect
Joseph H. Walker, for example, reminded a Republican dinner
of "the moral distinctions" between the parties.
"The Democratic leaders," he said, "have a vast pecuniary
interest in controlling the government. It is that party which
cultivates, sustains and defends the liquor traffic, the most subtle,
all-pervading and powerful single money interest that now exists in
this country. Clustering about it and sustained by it is every
degrading vice known to civilized man."9
It snowed on the day of the great Mechanics Hall rally, but the
newspapers were nevertheless able to report that "a pronounced
feature of the meeting was the presence, in a body, of some 600 of
Worcester's Scandinavian citizens, who marched to the hall from
the Thomas Street Methodist Church."1 0
The Republican United States Senator from Worcester, George
Frisbee Hoar, presided over the meeting. He remarked upon "the
26
great addiction to drink" imputed to "our Irish brethren," but
praised the Catholic clergy—none of whom seems to have been
present—for their efforts to combat the problem.
Following a series of addresses by Protestant ministers, Hoar
"remarked that one of the best omens in the city is the coming to us
in such large numbers of brethren of Scandinavian birth. It is
pleasing," he added, "to see them taking such an interest in this
question."
When a Swedish spokesman was finally introduced to explain
"how the Swedish people stood on the license question," he began
with a telling point, the force of which could not have been lost on
that audience. "The Swedish people," he declared "are all
Protestants."
The spokesman then showed how the Swedish record in
Worcester set them apart from other immigrants. "In this city you
will not find a saloon that is run by a Scandinavian, nor one who
acts as the tail for one kept by a Frenchman, Irishman, or German."
At that, the audience burst into applause.
The Swedish spokesman concluded with two final remarks sure
to link his delegation to the Yankee sponsors of the meeting. He
endorsed the reelection of the Republican mayor, and he pro­claimed
that "the principle of the American people is in opposition
to the liquor traffic and they will find that we will not antagonize
those principles."11
Thus could the strands of Protestantism, Republicanism, and
opposition to liquor—all characteristics of Yankee Worcester—be
picked up by a Swedish spokesman, be described as equally
characteristic of the Swedish immigrants, and finally be designated
as "the principle of the American people."
A few days later a group of Swedes met in the Thomas Street
Methodist Church to endorse Forsstedt for the School Committee;
when the Republican ward caucus was held shortly thereafter,
James Forsstedt the Swedish candidate because James Forsstedt the
Republican candidate.12
As the campaign unfolded, the no-license forces held a series of
rallies, invariably in Protestant churches and addressed by Protest­ant
ministers.13 The Swedes held one in their own Salem Street
Congregational Church, and the problems that meeting created for
James Forsstedt are instructive.
Despite the strong prohibitionist tendencies of the Swedes and
the high correlation between Republican and anti-liquor voting, not
27
all Republicans were reliably anti-liquor. Indeed, as the election of
1888 was about to demonstrate again, the Republicans could win
the mayoral race while the no-license campaign was losing. Mayor
Winslow would receive 55 percent of the vote, but the anti-liquor
vote would only reach 46 percent.
Under those conditions, Republican candidates often waffled on
the liquor question, and James Forsstedt was no exception. The day
before the election a Worcester newspaper reported:
Mr. James Forsstedt says this morning that his position as a
temperate man has been misstated. He spoke last evening at
the Salem Street Church meeting, and what he said about his
own habits was in substance as follows: He had taken no
temperance pledge and had been sometimes compelled to take
liquor as medicine, but he was not in the habit of taking
intoxicating drinks, although he did not profess to be abso­lutely
a total abstainer. Mr. Forsstedt is a candidate for the
School Committee on the republican ticket of Ward II, and
does not care to be represented as a habitual drinker.14
On election day, Forsstedt ran very strongly indeed, defeating his
Democratic opponent 74 percent to 26. An examination of the vote
on liquor licenses in his three precincts reveals the political wisdom
of his caution. In the first precinct, almost two-thirds of the voters
were in favor of licenses; in the second, where his Swedish
constituency was concentrated, two-thirds voted against; in the
third, the vote was almost evenly divided, no-license winning 52
percent to 48.15
Two incidents during the 1889 election campaign help to
corroborate this analysis of the dynamics of Worcester politics as
Swedes began to get elected to office.
Worcester was in the early stages of what would become a heated
controversy over accommodating the Irish Catholics in the public
schools.16 Simultaneously, the whole state was about to use the
Australian ballot for the first time. And, of course, the campaign
over the annual referendum on liquor licenses was under way. The
tutelary role of the Yankees, and the message they conveyed,
emerged with special clarity when the Worcester Swedes invited
Mrs. Mary E. Trask Hill of Boston to address what was billed as a
temperance rally.
Following a "devotional exercise," Mrs. Hill "spoke of the great
importance of the preservation of our public school system from the
threatened attacks made upon it in certain quarters, and urged
28
Scandinavians to become naturalized as fast as they can, to make
themselves acquainted with our laws and institutions, and assume
that position in our politics which their growing numbers and
intelligence entitle them to."
Following addresses in Swedish by several clergymen, Mrs. Hill
explained the new voting system and called on volunteers to play
various roles. The "temperance" meeting had become an opportu­nity
for a Yankee defender of the public schools to tutor Swedes in
the most effective use of their voting power.17
The anti-liquor bond between the Swedes and the Yankees was
also illustrated in 1889 when a Worcester newspaper editorial
entitled "Snakes in the Grass" charged that dissident Republicans
were "manipulating" the Swedes by urging them to vote for the
Prohibition candidate for mayor.18 A Swedish clergyman replied in
a letter that the Swedes would indeed bolt to the Prohibitionists,
but not because they were easily manipulated. The Swedes were
angry, wrote the Reverend Henry W. Eklund, because "the present
city government voted . . . to grant a liquor license to a Swede, in
face of the earnest protest of a great majority of the Swedish
people."1 9
The rebel saloonkeeper was Martin Trulson, who had not only
obtained a liquor license, but had opened a saloon directly across
Thomas Street from the Reverend Mr. Eklund's Swedish Methodist
Church.2 0
As things turned out, the Swedes did not bolt to the Prohibition­ists
in 1889, but the scandal of Martin Trulson's saloon was at least
temporarily put down. The anti-liquor forces achieved one of their
rare victories; no licenses would be issued in Worcester in 1890.21
James Forsstedt remained the only Swedish elected official in
Worcester until 1893, when John F. Lundberg took a seat on the
Common Council. In 1897 a Swedish State representative was
elected, and in 1904 an alderman. By 1916 there were two Swedes
on the School Committee, three on the Common Council, three on
the Board of Aldermen, and one in the state House of Representa­tives,
all Republicans. In 1916 Pehr G. Holmes was elected mayor of
Worcester.
The state of the art in Worcester politics had evolved considerably
since the late 1880s. The Democrats had taken to nominating Irish
candidates for mayor. In 1901 the Democrats had even elected the
30-year-old Philip J. O'Connell to the city's highest office. From
1901 through 1915 a Yankee Republican had run against an Irish
Democrat every year, and the Democrats had won five times.
29
It was clear that the Democrats would nominate labor leader
James H. Reardon again in 1916. The composition of the Republi­can
ticket, nominated by acclamation at a city convention, reveals
how thoroughly the new Republican strategy was aimed at
undermining the Catholic and working-class votes.
For mayor, the Republicans nominated Pehr G. Holmes, born in
Sweden, an immigrant to Worcester in 1885 at the age of four, and
in 1916 president of his own electroplating firm.2 2 For alderman-at-large
the choice was Narcisse J. Lavigne, son of French-Canadian
Catholic immigrants, owner of a printing firm, and member of
the Chamber of Commerce and the Rotary Club.2 3 For school
committeeman-at-large the candidate was Albert Inman, a Yankee,
a partner in the steel business established by his father and
grandfather, an active Mason, and a member of the anti-liquor
Independent Order of Good Templars.24
The Republicans offered the voters two self-made men—one a
Swedish Congregationalist, the other a French Catholic—and a
Yankee born to industrial wealth.
The Swedish working-class vote had grown enormously in the
years since 1898, but it was not yet as reliably Republican as the
party would have liked. Holmes was expected to pull virtually the
entire Swedish vote into the Republican column.25
Lavigne's candidacy recognized the increasing tendency of
French-Canadian voters to abandon the Irish-dominated Demo­cratic
Party. Since the French vote was also traditionally pro-liquor,
Lavigne's presence on the ticket would help it transcend differ­ences
on the license question, which was still appearing on the
ballot every year. Inman gave the ticket its Yankee industrialist, and
a teetotaler to boot.
As the December voting drew near, the no-license forces
mounted a more vigorous campaign than they had in years. A
determined effort was undertaken to bring the popular evangelist
Billy Sunday to town to administer the coup de grâce to the saloon.
The effort failed, despite the appeal of two thousand Worcesterites
who went to Sunday's Boston tabernacle to chant in unison, "We
want Billy Sunday in Worcester."26
Holmes, Lavigne, and Inman won " in a walk," as the headline
put it.2 7 Holmes repeated his triumph in 1917 and 1918.
Still later, Holmes rendered the Republican party considerable
additional service by winning and holding the Worcester seat in the
United States House of Representatives from 1931 to 1947. The
30
votes of the Swedish and Yankee Republicans in Worcester,
combined with the largely Yankee vote of the Worcester County
towns, were enough to hold back the Democratic tide rising in the
city.
Pehr Holmes brought the Swedish-Yankee political partnership to
two of its pinnacles, first by winning the mayoralty as Irish
Democrats threatened, and then by holding the congressional seat
in the face of the same mounting force. Throughout the Roosevelt
years, Worcester, a largely working-class and Catholic city, was
represented in Washington by a Protestant Republican business­man.
When the tide could be resisted no longer, Holmes was
defeated by an Irish-Catholic lawyer, Harold Donohue, in 1946; the
seat has been in Irish Democratic hands ever since.28
The partnership of Yankees and Swedes revealed in the Worcester
political record extended into other relationships in the community.
Although those relationships have not been studied in detail, a
suggestive sampling is available from Charles Nutt's four-volume
history of Worcester published in 1919. Two of the volumes contain
only biographical sketches, which can be used as a rough index to
community relationships as well as to community prestige as seen
through Yankee eyes in the era of Pehr Holmes' mayoralty.
The overwhelming majority of the biographical entries concern
Yankees, but over 50 are about men of Swedish stock and 29 about
men of French-Canadian background. Although these two groups
could be found in Republican alliance with the Yankees during
those years, for the French the association seems to have been
largely limited to politics; for the Swedes, it went well beyond.
The French and the Swedes were of approximately equal
numbers in the city, so there is an initial disparity in the fact that
Nutt included 50 Swedes and 29 Franco-Americans. This is
especially unbalanced since fully one-fourth of the French listed
were members of the Belisle family, one of whose members was
Nutt's consultant on that ethnic group.
The fields in which the men had achieved their success are
significant. Thirteen of the Swedes, or 26 percent, owned sizable
manufacturing establishments, most of them in the booming metal
industries. Only two of the French, or seven percent, could be
described as manufacturers. In this regard, the French looked less
like the Yankees and Swedes and more like their Irish co­religionists.
Of the 104 Irish citizens of Worcester included in the
Nutt biographies, only eight individuals, or seven percent, owned
31
their own manufacturing companies, all of them small concerns.29
Six of the Swedes were in high supervisory positions in major
Worcester industries, but none of the French. Thirty-eight percent
of the Swedes and 36 percent of the French were involved in such
diverse commercial activities as auto repairs, building contracting,
and undertaking. In this area of business life, the Swedish and
French entries appear in virtually equal proportions.
Very significantly, the sharp divergence between the Swedes and
the French found among manufacturers reappears among profes­sionals,
including journalists as well as lawyers, physicians,
dentists, and teachers. Twelve of the French, or 43 percent, were
listed by Nutt based on their accomplishments in these fields, as
compared with six, or 12 percent, of the Swedes.
The economic importance, to the individual and to the ethnic
group, of membership in the industrial ownership class is too
obvious to require comment here. The Swedes were, from this data
at least, gaining membership in that class much more readily than
were men of French-Canadian background, though the French had
arrived in Worcester in significant numbers a generation earlier
than the Swedes.
From this it can be suggested that the pronounced preference for
Swedish workers shown very early by Yankee manufacturers may
have extended to a marked preference for Swedes when it came to
providing the capital necessary for launching manufacturing
enterprises. Timothy J. Meagher has cited Irish complaints about
their exclusion in Worcester from "networks of connections which
might have aided their climb up to higher positions of finance or
corporate management" as well as from the networks of credit
needed to start their own enterprises.30 If Yankee discrimination
toward the Irish was based on religious differences, the Catholic
French-Canadians presumably suffered from the same discrimina­tion,
despite their political cooperation with Yankee Republicans.
The Yankee historian Charles Nutt summed up with the Yankee
attitude toward the Swedish-American population in 1919. "No
race," Nutt wrote of the Swedes, "has been more welcome and
none has more readily adjusted itself to American standards. . . .
While some idea of the activities of the Swedish people can be
gained from their social and religious organizations, it is impossible
to give a separate history of the Swedish people. They form a
constituent part of the people of the city, in church and society as
well as business and politics."
32
Nutt marshalled evidence to support the claim that the Swedes
were virtually indistinguishable from the "American" population
that had welcomed them. The sequence of his points is worth
noting:
Swedish families attend the various Protestant churches in
large numbers. As a rule, the Scandinavian citizen supports
the Republican party, but with no little degree of independ­ence.
And they have always shown a true loyalty to their
adopted country in times of peace and war.31
The Swedes were welcome, they were Protestant, they were
Republicans, and they were loyal Americans. It is doubtful that
Charles Nutt, a son of Harvard and member of the Sons of the
American Revolution, could have paid them any higher tribute.32
NOTES
'Frederick Hale, "Nordic Immigration: The New Puritans?", T h e Swedish Pioneer
Historical Historical Q u a r t e r l y , 28 (1977), 42-43.
2 I b i d . , 28.
W o r c e s t e r E v e n i n g Gazette, Nov. 7, 1888, p. 4.
"Source: Worcester E v e n i n g Gazette, Dec. 12, 1888, p. 4.
5Charles Nutt, H i s t o r y of Worcester and Its People, 4 vols. (New York, 1919), III, 106.
'Worcester Evening Gazette, Oct. 8, 1888, p. 4; Oct. 17, 1888, p. 4.
7 I b i d . , Nov. 19, 1888, p. 4.
"Ibid.
' I b i d . , Nov. 19, 1888, p.4.
' " I b i d . , Nov. 26, 1888.
" I b i d .
" I b i d . , Nov. 30, 1888, p. 4; Dec. 1, 1888, p. 4.
" I b i d . , Dec. 3, 1888, p. 6; Dec. 4, 1888, pp. 5, 10.
" I b i d . , Dec. 10, 1888, p. 4.
" I b i d . , Dec. 12, 1888, p. 4.
16Robert J. Kolesar, "Politics and Policy in a Developing Industrial City: Worcester,
Massachusetts in the Late Nineteenth Century," (unpublished Ph.D dissertation,
Clark University, 1987) Chapt. 4.
" W o r c e s t e r E v e n i n g Gazette, Oct. 15, 1889, p. 4
" I b i d . , Nov. 4, 1889, p. 4.
" I b i d . , Nov. 7, 1889, p. 4.
2 0 I b i d . , p. 5.
" I b i d . , Dec. 11, 1889, p. 4. Before he went out of business, Martin Trulson went on
trial, charged with selling liquor to an intoxicated man. He was acquitted, largely
due to the talents of his young attorney, Webster Thayer. Thayer would reappear in
the history of immigrant America as the trial judge in the Sacco and Vanzetti case.
2 2Nutt, H i s t o r y of Worcester, IV, 889.
" I b i d . , IV, 670.
" I b i d . , Ill, 426.
^Worcester Telegram, Dec. 4, 1916, p. 1.
2 H b i d . , Dec. 9, 1916, p. 2.
2 7 I b i d . , Dec. 13, 1916, p. 1.
33
2 aThe current incumbent, Joseph D. Early, succeeded Donohue upon his retirement
in 1975.
"Timothy J. Meagher, '"The Lord Is Not Dead:' Cultural and Social Change Among
the Irish in Worcester, Massachusetts," (unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, Brown
University 1982), 158.
m I b i d . , 176-77.
3 1 Nutt, H i s t o r y of Worcester, I, 351.
3 W i d . , IV, 568.
34